Interesting insight on the weather system.

It seems one of the designers (Mark Lewis) looking after the weather system has been reading this and had the following to say:

When we first started designing the F1 2010’s weather system, we quite quickly came to the conclusion that the only way to handle the system was to make the weather patterns at each track true to its real life counterpart in terms of how often a specific weather type was seen.

One of the first things we did was to source weather data for each location around the world and extrapolate specifics such as the maximum temperature, average rainfall, even the humidity levels. This threw up some interesting facts which we hadn’t really perceived before. Everyone has an idea of what weather type is specific to a track, but that’s not always correct. For example, if you think of Australia you think of hot sunny weather where as in reality it quite often rains at Australia; admittedly the rain isn’t always heavy but it does rain a lot!

Once this data was gathered and we plugged it into the weather system it quickly became apparent that our data was producing more occurrences of rain than was realistic. To fix this, we determined that we would need to gradually reduce the chance of seeing light or heavy rain, whilst sensibly increasing the chance of seeing clear, cloudy or overcast weather. This allowed us to tweak the system slowly over time until we were left with something which is quite realistic whilst still being capable of throwing the odd curveball in here and there.

On average, the system throws out around 5 or 6 wet races per season, however, as the system is dynamic its still possible that it could rain at every race. There are of course tracks where rain is more likely to occur, and the reverse of that, tracks where rain is unlikely to be seen at all. Malaysia and Spa are probably our wettest tracks, whilst some of the European tracks, such as Britain and Germany have an average chance of rainfall. In the reverse you’ll be unlikely to see rain in most of the Middle Eastern countries, although even at some of these there’s a slight chance of seeing light rain for a short period of time.